


The Rain, and Maggie

by dannika_undomielf



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bellamy Blake - Freeform, Fluff and Angst, I'm a terrible person, John Murphy (The 100) - Freeform, M/M, Murphamy Week, There's considerably more angst than fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-10 15:03:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7849705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dannika_undomielf/pseuds/dannika_undomielf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’d spent their first summer in museums, learning each other new with their fingers intertwined and squinting at abstract art. “Rome is built on ruins,” Bellamy had said, “Did you know?” and John hadn’t, not really, but maybe it was.</p><p>(AKA: Murphamy + 3000 words of heartache)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rain, and Maggie

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly; Lana. Thank you. I wouldn't have finished this without you♡  
> I wrote this listening to 'We're Not Who We Thought We Were' by Lighthouse and the Whaler and 'The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which, coincidentally, is the title inspiration (just in case anyone was wondering!)

It took less than three words for Miller to ruin his date, and less than that for him to be kicking at the gas all the way across town.

The rain falls so hard that it hammers against the windshield, wipers sliding across the glass, car flying along the black road, headlights sweeping the asphalt where the yellow centrelines disappear. There’s an old country song playing on the radio that dives gracefully into static.

He cranks down the window, runs a red light.

It’s his fault, he knows, for popping a tyre on the interstate and thumbing down a guy who spat tobacco into a paper cup the whole seventy miles to Portland. He’d asked for Raven Reyes at an auto shop where the roof leaked, thick drops of rainwater pooling between oil spills and discarded wrenches. She’d materialized from a back room, eyebrow cocked like a 45, saying “Kid, change your own damn tyre.” 

The room had filled with laughter then, from a flash of dark curls under the hood of an orange Camaro, bright and loud and beautiful like the fourth of July. “Kid can’t afford us, Reyes. We’re the fucking Ritz.” 

He should have left then and there, with his keys biting into his palm, but he’d smirked the way Emori claimed would charm the clothes off a nun and waited them out, metallic scent sticking wetly to his skin like he was born in it. He’d hauled his life to Portland after that, more determined to map constellations on Bellamy Blake’s cheekbones than to follow a scholarship to New Mexico.

 _“My_ fault,” he tells the scratching of the radio.

His own ignorant _stupidity_ for handing his heart over to a forest fire smile and hoping- _waiting_ , to be loved in return.

An oncoming pair of headlights give him reason to glare, so he narrows his eyes, hangs on a little tighter to the wheel under his hands.

It's 00:17 when he twists the car left onto a patch of gravel loose enough to shred an already desolate paint job, the digits mocking him in little red bursts from the dashboard. It might have been a trailer park once, or one of those truck stops that went out of business, because there’s a shack and another shack beside that, two streetlights and nothing but dirt and dust stretched out in between.

He realises the shack is a bar when he parks, green curtains at the windows where red neon lights flash through. No amount of material could make the place anything less than what it is; a hole smack bang in the middle of nowhere, where dreams and fleas clearly came to die.

John watches the door open. A jukebox leaks _Raindance Maggie_ into the night, Smith’s rhythm chasing the wind south while some guy pukes on his shoes.  

“Nice place,” he says, and kills the engine.  

He finds Bellamy in a plume of smoke, lips wrapped around a cigarette, cheeks hollow, back braced heavily against a wall where someone has tacked up handwritten posters about urban coyotes. A glass tower on the counter spills bourbon like tar.

“Your usual poison, then,” John says, before his throat turns into a desert.

Bellamy sways like a six foot shipwreck, hazy-eyed and heedless. The lines of him are all wrong. Smudgy, unfamiliar territory, as if he can’t even fill his own bones.  

“Fuck are you doing here?” 

“David called Nate. Nate called me.” 

John had picked up on the third ring, blinking through the fluorescent lighting at the caller ID. “It’s Bellamy," Miller had said, and he’d up and left in that same beat. He couldn’t bring himself to care he’d walked out on a guy with a nice mouth.

Bellamy had been under his skin too long.

“Of course he did.” Bellamy says, taps out a nonsense rhythm on the counter. It's an old habit.

John’s mouth tastes like sand. “You look like shit.” 

“Shouldn’t you be with _Sterling?”_ Bellamy says the name spitefully, as if it’s something dirty, something he stepped in and can’t scrape from the underside of his shoe.

John hadn’t touched Sterling in months. Sterling was the kind of boy you marry, meant for far more graceful things than the ink stains on John’s palms and the way he’d mark his skin, just to feel something.

Everyone wanted something he couldn’t give.

John sighs, sounds like sleepless nights. “We’ve all got better things to do than pull your sorry ass out of the gutter, Bellamy.”

The bartender looks offended, grunts his disapproval with a rag in one hand and a neck of beer in the other, like the poker game getting rowdy at the far end of the room and everything smelling like piss and cheap beer is all good and _holy._

“Wade," Bellamy says loudly, “top me up.” 

“Haven’t you had enough?” John scoffs, places his palm flat over the glass Bellamy inches forward with a fingertip.

Wade snorts, offers sympathy and the bottle.

John snatches it without thinking, muscle memory- _back back back_ to being thirteen, godless woman, loud unholy words and shattering- throws it against the wall where it becomes glass teeth and brown rivers. The wall looks better for it. The jukebox goes quiet. Nobody says a damn thing.

“You’ve had _enough_. We’re going.”

Bellamy narrows his eyes, shakes his head. Feels the room spinning. “I’m not going anywhere.”

John’s hands feel like earthquakes. He buries half moons in the skin of his palms. “What’s he owe you?”

The bartender pours draft beer, slides it across the bar to some forlorn looking guy with _Merle_ stitched sloppily into his shirt pocket. Merle empties his pockets of coins.

“Two hundred dollar tab," he says, vowels lazy.

Bellamy doesn’t have two hundred bucks to his name, but bourbon puddles in his stomach anyway and John curses, a long line of profanities this town and these walls are no stranger to. “There’s two-eighty,” he says, slamming green bills down beside the shot glasses. “He doesn’t get through that door again. This place doesn’t serve him.”

The bartender grins, wry and crooked and showing two gold teeth in the corner of his mouth. "You got it."

“And _you,”_

Bellamy flinches when John whirls on him, blue eyes full of fire. He’s always seen straight through them, straight through  _Murphy,_ and now, like a coward, he stares at his hands- swollen knuckles, brown skin, the horizontal scar on the bridge of his thumb- because he knows what he’ll find; barely contained fury and the truth.  

“You stay here and fucking rot.” 

The small moments are crumbling, heavy and pulling him beneath the surface. Light touches, stolen kisses. Enough of them to drown in.

All this anger, nowhere to put it.

John steps into the night with his hands knuckle-white in his pockets, pressed inside the denim like the four leaf clovers Emori used to leave there. He would find them everywhere back then, as if they poured from the seams of her. Confetti, secrets, confessions.

“I’ll have you burnt for witchcraft,” he’d smirked once. She’d cast a knowing look over a basil plant, eyes the colour of wet earth, saying “You’d burn with me, John Murphy,” which was the truth. It was always the truth, with Emori. She was magic like that.

Now the rain bleeds through his skin, buries the cold September in the pit of his stomach.

They'd spent a night in Arizona once; Bellamy slouched on the steps of a closed up gas station with a cigarette and Octavia sleeping in the backseat, and him, punishing the grit, insisting Bellamy would be dead by thirty smoking twenty a day like that.

It was just a night, beautifully quiet like the small town future John saw bathed in Bellamy, until it wasn't. He should have known then, when the Buick wrapped itself around a garbage truck right there on that long road, no apologies, just dead men and smoke- he should have known. He should have _always_ known.   

“You’re still here,” Bellamy says, silhouette dappled stark and gold under the streetlight.

John would rather be anywhere else. “Seems like it.”

It never used to feel like this, like waiting for a storm to hit, but tonight they exist there, in the silence as it elongates, long limbed and sore; John swallowed by the Chevy’s shadow, head tipped back like he can’t figure out whether to kick the car or the gas or the curb or the curve of Bellamy’s jaw, and Bellamy, unsteady and shivering, mouth full of blurred apologies.    

“Murph, I-” Bellamy tries- one step forward, then another, gravel complaining-

John had lost his heart to that voice, felt it against his skin on mornings where sunsets chalked the ceiling yellow. It was those mornings he’d built a home in- under those soft blue sheets, in the sculpted skylines of Bellamy’s copper shoulders, between their bodies when they had tangled in each other.

He’d broken his own heart, watching it shift into ashes, burned and loveless and left to fester.       

He feels that burning now. It always came back, somehow, the way his mother didn't. She said that she would, but she didn’t, and maybe it’s hereditary, the leaving, but all he knows is that he can’t bear _this,_ the weight of the ghosts in his chest, so he brushes the ache from his bones and accuses, "You were supposed to pick up Octavia today.”

Bellamy just _blinks_ , caught off guard, as if, maybe, the seven year old with the ribbons in her hair and big butterfly dreams had temporarily stopped existing. Part of him hoped she had. He wouldn't bury Octavia here too.

John speaks without meaning to. Autopilot mouth. "You’re a piece of shit, Bellamy Blake."

“Don’t act like you care- she’s _my_ sister, _my_ responsibility. _I’m_ there for her and-”

“You’ve been _here,_ ” John can barely breathe, but he forces words into the dark regardless. “You’ve built this fucking wall between you and the rest of the world, and you’re _here,_ drinking yourself to death just like y-”

It’s on the tip of his tongue with every intention to draw blood, but he can’t bring himself to say it, so he sighs, jams his eyes shut at the edge of a cliff with a steep, steep drop into something he can’t crawl back from. “Just- get in the car."

Bellamy says, “I want to hear you say it,” low and quiet.

John knows that voice, the edge in it. What it means. “Bellamy-”

“Say it! Spit it out!”

“I don’t want to say it!”

“I don’t care what you want! Say it. _Say_ it you fucking cowa-”

So much of John was bravado, a brightly coloured pantomime in low lighting, and there was none left, not tonight, so he says it. “Like your mother.” 

A soft whisper, in the hope the rain would wash it away, cushion the blow somehow. But it doesn't, of course it doesn't.

Bellamy breaks like a wave, comes apart in salt and sand and shallow water. Looks like devastation; Palestine left wilting and wounded, Atlantis drowned. Lost. It feels like blasphemy, a place that says _there is no forgiveness here._    

John's heart communicates in morse code, frantic apologies colliding with his ribcage over and over.

“I was fine, before I met you,” Bellamy says, “Everything got difficult after that.”

John wants to ask him when any of this was meant to be easy, but only speaks his name like a prayer. "Bellamy, I-"

“ _Fuck._ ” Bellamy’s armour is in the corner, shoulders low in surrender. “You’ve made your point. Alright?”

“No,” John says, “Not alright,” because his mother had taught him hard edges and sirens where Bellamy had taught him the opposite; sunrises and stars and golden things, seeing the light in him when he was the least worthy of it.

He doesn’t feel himself moving, but he does, gravel shifting under his feet. Little sighs of dust until Bellamy is _right there,_ molten eyes and a smile he’d fight wars for, even now.

Brings a finger under his chin, holds his rough-water gaze.

“I know- I know that you watched Aurora-” He says slowly, fighting the words out when his throat feels like closing up, “I know what watching her die did to you, but you can’t- you can’t do what she did. You can’t- I need you to hear this- _you_ need to hear this. Octavia needs you, she can’t watch you bury yourself out here. _I_ can’t watch you do this to yourself. You don’t- you don’t get to fall apart and make us watch. I know this isn’t you. I know you, Bellamy,”

John touches Bellamy’s cheek with the back of his knuckles, tentative, like he’s testing it out. “ _I know you._ ”  

John used to touch him like this, soft and loving, something meant only for lovers. Bellamy can’t place what it is that stings; his touch or the memory of it. Their fingers slip together like spokes.

“I’m not giving up on you. I’m right here. Just let me help. Please, Bell. Let me help. Okay?”

Bellamy lets out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding. Echoes him.  _Okay, okay, okay, okay._

 

John says "Seatbelt," like an "I love you," and Bellamy curls up into the rough fabric of the passenger seat - _small small small-_ heart beating like he’s falling into something he can’t climb out of. He turns the radio louder, poking at the dial while his hands tremble. Classical music crackles through the speakers, a melodic and calm up and down of a piano.

“Chopin,” John tells the road, mostly to fill up the barren space between them. The uncertainty of it.

“Of course you’d know it,” Bellamy mutters, head resting against the window. The night is full of far away thunder and sheets of rain and his own heartbeat. 

“You know why I know it.” John says, and Bellamy did, because he’d witnessed those haunted nights.

The ones John had filled with piano and instrumental soundtracks just to drown out the ghosts, the ones where he had woke up screaming.  _You’re here,_ Bellamy would whisper,  _you’re here and you’re safe with me._

John thinks _look at us now._ Gracelessly switches lanes.

Bellamy restlessly taps his fingers against the glass. "Miller shouldn't have called you. Everything was fine."

"Sure," John says, "I can see how backcountry goat herding would work for you."

Bellamy breathes a laugh; a muted ghost of the velvet sound John remembered. Says nothing. His hair falls out of place, sloping blackly over his eyes, and John’s fingers itch- his hand darts forward an inch only to hover in the air. Pulls back. 

When Bellamy speaks at last, his voice is weary, defeated. A whispered apology. He doesn’t know how to truly be angry with John, either. The two of them are like damp wood that won’t light.

John sighs. Keeps his eyes on the road. Says, "I wish I believed you," because late nights have always been for honesty. 

 

John wakes beneath blue cotton sheets. The ceiling is chalked pastel yellow, dawn washing in through the open window and he blinks. Beside him, Bellamy stirs in his sleep, a restful curve of warm Sahara planes draped over John’s Alaska.

Memories flood in, turning years into a tide. It's an ocean that burns.

John moves quietly, untangling their entwined limbs. His skin smells like last night’s cold rain, like smoke and sandalwood. Like Bellamy.

“Where you going?” Bellamy murmurs, and reaches for him. Eyes closed, half awake.

“I’ll be right back,” John says. The lie tastes bitter, like red wine. He finds his jacket across the room, shrugs into it.

“You’re leaving.”

John presses his palm to the door. Everything feels raw. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Then, a careful sigh, “I'm leaving.”

“Don’t,” Bellamy says, lightning quick, “Don’t leave.”

John says, “I was always going to leave,” because he is his mother’s son.

He hates himself for it. Feels sick to the stomach, feels Bellamy flinch. Can't even look at him.

“Please Murph, I- Fuck. _John_. Don’t-” Bellamy sounds unsteady, like the floorboards are not solid enough to keep him upright. “Is this- is this you punishing me? For-”

They’d spent their first summer in museums, learning each other new with their fingers intertwined and squinting at abstract art. “Rome is built on ruins,” Bellamy had said, “Did you know?” and John hadn’t, not really, but maybe it was.

Maybe Rome was beautiful because Romulus made it so, or maybe it had firebird wings made from coliseums and ashes. Maybe it had healed by mistake.

They had torn each other apart back then, hurricanes colliding. Their cities were mouthfuls of broken things, mistakes and heartache. Streets which bled themselves dry. Their coliseums had begged for Pompeii.

“No, I –”

“Then what the fuck?!” Bellamy shouts, steps closer. He’s giving everything away with just his eyes; dark and deep and honest, like a Frost poem. “I just. I don’t _understand_. Okay? If you just – just explain it to me, if you just – Because I don’t understand, I can’t– I love you, and I don’t understand why–”

John feels nauseous, can’t even breathe and _fuck-_

Bellamy glances up, nervous smile, cluster of freckles prominent against his cheekbones. Says “I love you," surer this time, like he means it. 

Like it's somehow self-explanatory.

Years ago, Bellamy had coaxed Columbus from John's bones, had laughed when John discovered star fields tucked under his shoulder blades, the dimpled continents of his spine. Blushed when he memorised them. Now, John watches the tension in his body, the shudder in his breath, sees the truth of it. 

John knows he'd smoke a cigarette right there, fill his lungs with smoke and wait for the vanishing act.

“I can't watch you leave.” Bellamy whispers.

He remembers the aftermath, standing in the shower with his spine against the tiles, body shaking like New Orleans after Katrina. Bellamy cut in deeper than he had given him permission to, and then it went wrong, all of it.

John's voice is small. “But we tear each other apart.”

Bellamy says, "We don't have to," and John blinks. Stands in a place of caught breath, the door of a blue house left ajar, incoherent thoughts.

He hears Bellamy stumble, mid-sentence to say; "You're smiling," and feels himself laugh, "God, do you ever shut the fuck up?"

It's simple after that, when he closes the distance between them.

The kiss is soft, slow, like coming home after years adrift. He sinks into it, instinctive, fingers skimming across Bellamy's brown skin to his shoulders, holding him close. Bellamy tastes like relief, something familiar.

"So-" Bellamy murmurs, "Maybe we- maybe we should move to that small town? Together." 

John shrugs, winds his fingers in Bellamy’s hair to draw his body against his own.

“Home has always been a person,” he whispers, and he is beautifully lost and simply found, all at once.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel a little apprehensive posting (mainly because I feel uncertain about the ending, I swear I have the confidence of a cardboard box) but here goes nothing. I hope it's okay! Love and blueberry yogurt to everyone who got this far <3  
> (I can be found on Tumblr @blueinej !! Feel free to come join me yelling about Murphamy there)


End file.
